I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
I feel that at this stage in our social development the House will welcome this piece of legislation and I am pleased to be able to present the Bill for consideration. We have our social welfare code and our redundancy payments legislation and I think it is a logical sequence that we should now give legislative backing to the concept of minimum periods of notice in respect of the termination of employment. As a first step in this area, the Bill, as I have indicated, provides for minimum standards and I would expect that these standards will be reviewed periodically in the light of experience. In anticipation of this, provision is made in the Bill for variations in the periods of notice by way of affirmative order.
The Bill sets out to do two simple things. The first is to prescribe a minimum period of notice which must be given by an employer who wishes to dispense with the services of an employee, or by an employee who wishes to leave his employment. The second is to give any employee who is in doubt about any or the more important terms of his employment the right to have the terms confirmed in writing by his employer.
Under the Bill an employer will be entitled to a statutory minimum of one week's notice but the entitlement of an employee will vary with his service. He will be entitled to one week's notice if in service for at least 13 weeks but less than two years, two weeks' notice if in service for two to five years, four weeks' notice if in service for five to ten years, six weeks' notice if in service for ten to 15 years, and eight weeks' notice if in service for over 15 years. I should like to emphasise that this legislation should not impose any financial burden on employers. Where an employer proposes to dispense with the services of a worker, he notifies him in one form or another. It should not cost anything to bring this notification into conformity with the minimum period requirements laid down in the Bill, where such is not the case already. There is, of course, nothing to prevent an employer from giving better terms than those provided for in the Bill.
The Bill will not interfere with the rights of employers and employees who may wish, by mutual agreement, to dispense with notice of any kind. Neither will it interfere with the rights of one party to terminate employment without notice in the event of serious misconduct by the other party.
In addition to the minimum notice question, I am providing in the Bill that a worker will have a statutory right to get from his employer, on request, written particulars of the main terms of his employment: in the absence of better terms the statutory minimum periods of notice would, of course, form part of the terms of his employment. I see no good reason why a worker who wants this kind of documentary evidence should not have the right to get it on request.
Deputies will have noted that disputes under the Bill will be dealt with, in the first instance, by the Redundancy Appeals Tribunal but that there will be a right of appeal to the High Court on a question of law. This provision has been prompted not only by the desire to provide readily accessible machinery for resolving such disputes, but also by the high degree of acceptability which the tribunal's decisions in other fields have won from employers and workers alike. I hope that this piece of legislation will be conducive to good employer-employee relations, and I commend it to the House.